What is faith?

When I was a young child I went to a live enactment of Peter Pan. We children were enjoined to clap our hands and believe so that Tinker Bell would live. Even though I was a child, I was angry and insulted that we were being asked to believe that my belief or lack therefore had any impact on Tinker Bell living. If it was up to me, she would have died on the spot. Fortunately for the script, the other children were more tractable.

Is faith clapping your hands and believing what the nice man on the stage tells you to believe?

There are many who grew up in Christian churches for whom the Christian faith is no different than children clapping their hands so that Tinker Bell can live. The lived it. They grew up in it. They found nothing but fakery and make believe in the entire experience. For them faith is a dirty word. An expression used only by charlatans and the credulous.

And because of this accusation that faith is fake and fraudulent the defenders of a Christian faith will go to great lengths to prove that faith is compatible with reason. They will seek to prove that smart and educated people can be Christians. What they seek to do is to rescue the reputation of faith by means of things that have nothing to do with faith. If reason and facts support faith, then what is the need for the faith in the first place?

In the English language we don’t call ideas we arrive at on the basis of facts and reason “faith”. Rather, we say we have proved something when we think no faith is required and that anyone who looks at the facts and uses reason will come to the same opinion as us. Faith is for those beliefs when the facts we can observe and reason we muster provide us with no support. There is an unavoidable tension between idea of accepting something because of facts and logic and believing in something because of faith.

But there is one way in which faith and reason are similar. The value of either is entirely dependent on the foundation on which they are built. Reason only has value to the extent that the facts or the premises it is based on are true. Try as they might, even the best mathematicians and most careful students of logic have not managed to create a system of logic that justifies itself without reference to these supports. This means that at the end of the day, reason is only as good as the foundation on which it is constructed. In the same way, faith is only as good as the authority on which it is based. Simply squeezing your eyes shut and trying very hard to believe something you want to be true has no value. Trusting a medical professional even though you don’t understand what they are saying might have some value. Trusting an almighty God has a lot of value if you can trust his promises.

And there is another way in which faith and reason are similar. For both, the right answer has no value in the absence of the right process. If you are taking a math class and someone slips you all the answers to the test, you have not used reason even if you get every answer right. In the same way, if someone expresses a faith that rests on what their parents have said, they don’t have a Christian faith even if they say Christian things. A Christian faith should rest on Christ. A faith in ones parents is a form of a faith, but it is not a Christian one. Since faith’s value is entirely dependent on the value of that in which the faith is being placed, it is important to be clear about what authority your faith is resting on.

I think all Christians understand this. If our faith does not truly rest on Christ and his works we are “Of all men the most to be pitied” as Paul says in another context. In fact, such a belief is a legitimate litmus test for claiming the name Christian. Anyone who does not claim that their faith is based on Christ and his works is claiming the name “Christian” in a cultural sense only. But if Christians say that Christ is the only valid foundation of faith, we should avoid holding out ourselves as sources of authority for others to put their faith in. It is in this regard that we so often fail.

Paul’s famous statement in Roman’s Chapter 14 that “everything that does not come from faith is sin” is an attempt to address our tendency to present ourselves as sources of authority or to look to others to provide that authority. Is Paul saying that anything that someone believes in sincerely is right? No. But Paul says that placing your faith in someone other than God is wrong even if that person is right about a particular point. For him the crucial point is that we will all answer directly to God and for that reason no one should try to get in-between that relationship. As he says earlier in Chapter 14…

You, then, why do you judge your brother? Or why do you treat them with contempt? For we will all stand before God’s judgment seat. It is written:

“‘As surely as I live,’ says the Lord,
‘every knee will bow before me;
every tongue will acknowledge God.’”

So then, each of us will give an account of ourselves to God. Therefore let us stop passing judgment on one another.

It is in this context that Paul says….

So whatever you believe about these things keep between yourself and God. Blessed is the one who does not condemn himself by what he approves. But whoever has doubts is condemned if they eat, because their eating is not from faith; and everything that does not come from faith is sin.

Taken in context, Paul’s statement “everything that does not come from faith is sin” is saying that a person has an obligation to obey God and we should not try to place ourselves in the place of God in someone else’s life even if we are right. For Paul, it is what is being set up as an authority in the hearts and minds of the Romans that was the crucial thing and not whether they had a common understanding of what foods could be eaten.

But Paul’s argument sets us up with a problem. Paul says that we are free to eat all food and he holds out his faith in support of that claim. He also says that one who “doubts” is wrong to eat the food because their faith does not allow them to eat the food with a clear conscience. But if we suppose (as Paul seems to be taking for granted) that both examples have a legitimate faith in God, what then is the value of their faith? How can an authority be a valid foundation for faith if two people with the same authority don’t have a common understanding as to the nature of what they are allowed to eat? If we can have faith that is legitimately founded on an almighty God and yet be confused as to what food we can eat, how are we any better off than those without faith?

If your faith was placed in the authority of a set of rules and laws, you would not have this problem. The answer is found in the rules and if the answer is not found in the rules it is outside the scope of your faith. If your faith is in a well reasoned argument, then extending out the logic will give you your answer unless it is outside the scope your faith. If you place your faith in these things, the authority you are placing your faith in will provide you with answers. But those answers will be limited because what you are putting your faith in is limited. Rules have a limit. Logic has its bounds. If they are your authority your faith will have well defined answers and well defined limits.

But Paul does not see logic or rules as being the proper foundation of faith. As he says in First Corinthians Chapter Two ….

“When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.”

God’s power is not limited. So if your faith is based on God’s power then the scope of your faith is not limited. But in our frail humanness, this presents its own problems.

These problems can be seen in the grief of Mary and Martha over the death of their brother Lazarus. They had experienced the power of God. They had founded their faith on the authority of God’s power and not on wise and persuasive words. But that left them in a place where they knew for a fact that God could have saved the life of their brother and he chose not to. As we read in John Chapter 11…

When Mary reached the place where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and said, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

Their concrete and personal experience of God’s power meant that they knew without a doubt the death of their loved one was not a random happenstance but rather an act of God’s will. This left them with questions that make the dilemma about what food to eat seem trivial in comparison. A faith based on God’s power alone gives us no guidance. All it affirms is what Job knew a long time ago. God is indeed mighty but knowledge of God’s might provides no ground for faith by itself.

Basing ones faith on unlimited God requires an unlimited faith because his actions cannot be comprehended by our limited reason. And since we are limited creatures we cannot come up with an unlimited faith even if we witness God’s power. This is why Job laments in Job Chapter 9 that….

God is wise in heart and mighty in strength.
Who has resisted Him and prospered?
He moves mountains without their knowledge
and overturns them in His anger.
He shakes the earth from its place,
so that its foundations tremble.
He commands the sun not to shine;
He seals off the stars.
He alone stretches out the heavens
and treads on the waves of the sea.
He is the Maker of the Bear and Orion,
of the Pleiades and the constellations of the south.
He does great things beyond searching out,
and wonders without number.
Were He to pass by me, I would not see Him;
were He to move, I would not recognize Him.
If He takes away, who can stop Him?
Who dares to ask Him, ‘What are You doing?’
God does not restrain His anger;
the helpers of Rahab cower beneath Him.

How then can I answer Him
or choose my arguments against Him?
For even if I were right, I could not answer.
I could only beg my Judge for mercy.
If I summoned Him and He answered me,
I do not believe He would listen to my voice.
For He would crush me with a tempest
and multiply my wounds without cause.
He does not let me catch my breath,
but overwhelms me with bitterness.
If it is a matter of strength,
He is indeed mighty!
If it is a matter of justice,
who can summon Him?
Even if I were righteous, my mouth would condemn me;
if I were blameless, it would declare me guilty.

In view of God’s awesome power and Job’s inability to comprehend his actions, Job later on in the same chapter sees no recourse but to beg for someone to mediate between himself and God saying….

If only there were someone to mediate between us,
someone to bring us together,
someone to remove God’s rod from me,
so that his terror would frighten me no more.
Then I would speak up without fear of him,
but as it now stands with me, I cannot.

If our faith was based on laws or logical precepts, it would be a nice contained thing. But of what use would such a contained faith be in the face of a God without limits? If our faith is based on God’s power, we can say he is indeed mighty. But how can that faith provide us with any comfort when we can see that he saves some and lets other die all for reasons we cannot comprehend? If we know God is powerful but we don’t understand anything else about him, how can his power support a faith that he will do any particular thing? Without knowledge of God’s character faith is impossible for us.

Yet we have been distorting Paul by acting as if he sets up a faith based on the mere witnessing of God’s power alone as the proper foundation of faith. As we read in Ephesians 3……

I became a servant of this gospel by the gift of God’s grace, given me through the working of His power. Though I am less than the least of all the saints, this grace was given me: to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to illuminate for everyone the stewardship of this mystery, which for ages past was kept hidden in God, who created all things. His purpose was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms, according to the eternal purpose that He accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord. In Him and through faith in Him we may enter God’s presence with boldness and confidence.

So I ask you not to be discouraged because of my sufferings for you, which are your glory…. for this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I ask that out of the riches of His glory He may strengthen you with power through His Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. Then you, being rooted and grounded in love, will have power, together with all the saints, to comprehend the length and width and height and depth of the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Now to Him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to His power that is at work within us, to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.

Paul never separates our faith from God’s power acting within us. He is well aware that in the absence of this power working within us we are no better off then Job. Paul’s Gospel is the presentation of the mediator that Job was looking for and he asserts that this mediator will dwell within us. And by dwelling within us, this mediator takes away the fear that Job had and enables us to enter God’s presence with boldness and confidence.

With a faith that is based on a power that is at work within us we are never left to our own frail devices. And it is through this power that we are enabled to participate in the works of Christ. These works includes even the seemingly simple things such as reaching out to God in prayer. As Paul says in Roman’s chapter 8…

Likewise the Spirit also helps in our weaknesses. For we do not know what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.

Many other examples of this “power at work within us” could be given. But in simple terms, Paul sees the power at work within us as enabling us to participate in the life of Christ with all that entails. This is why Paul is so bold as to say in Colossians Chapter 1….

Now I rejoice in what I am suffering for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions.

And this role of filling up the suffering of Christ is not unique to Paul. In the same chapter 8 in Romans that we quoted from earlier we read ….

The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba, Father.” The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.

But in our frailness, we can’t participate in Christ’s sufferings in a manner pleasing to God without also participating in the faith of Christ. The same power that works within us to enable us to do Christ’s works is what works within us to enable us to participate in this faith. Indeed, there are a many places in Paul’s writings (including in the section of Ephesians 3 that was quoted earlier) where “faith in Christ” can be translated “faith of Christ”. But I don’t think it is necessary to get bogged down in word studies or the ambiguities of translating the Greek text. The deliberate fusing of the seeming ambiguity of “faith in Christ” and “faith of Christ” is captured in John Chapter 15 where we read…

Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me.

“I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing.

But whether we talk about participation in the faith of Christ or of abiding in him, what does this mean in practical terms? How have we made any progress with the dilemma of those whose faith does not allow them to eat certain foods that Paul talked about in Romans? We might say that we are enabled to participate in the faith and works of Christ, but we still seem to have a very question filled faith.

Our answer to this puzzle depends on the nature of our understanding of Christ’s faith. Did his faith have questions? I think most Christians would answer that his faith was without questions. But what then are we to make of Jesus’ cry from the cross “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”

At first glance this is not much difference between this question and Job’s complaint about the unfathomableness of God’s seemingly unjust actions. But Jesus was quoting from Psalm 22. And so we will read this Psalm in its entirety in order to better understand the faith of Christ….

My God, my God,
why have You forsaken me?
Why are You so far from saving me,
so far from my words of groaning?
I cry out by day, O my God,
but You do not answer,
and by night,
but I have no rest.

Yet You are holy,
enthroned on the praises of Israel.
In You our fathers trusted;
they trusted and You delivered them.
They cried out to You and were set free;
they trusted in You and were not disappointed.

But I am a worm and not a man,
scorned by men and despised by the people.
All who see me mock me;
they sneer and shake their heads:
“He trusts in the LORD,
let the LORD deliver him;
let the LORD rescue him,
since He delights in him.”

Yet You brought me forth from the womb;
You made me secure at my mother’s breast.
From birth I was cast upon You;
from my mother’s womb You have been my God.
Be not far from me,
for trouble is near
and there is no one to help.

Many bulls surround me;
strong bulls of Bashan encircle me.
They open their jaws against me
like lions that roar and maul.
I am poured out like water,
and all my bones are disjointed.
My heart is like wax;
it melts away within me.
My strength is dried up like a potsherd,
and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth.
You lay me in the dust of death.

For dogs surround me;
a band of evil men encircles me;
they have pierced my hands and feet.
I can count all my bones;
they stare and gloat over me.
They divide my garments among them
and cast lots for my clothing.

But You, O LORD, be not far off;
O my Strength, come quickly to help me.
Deliver my soul from the sword,
my precious life from the power of wild dogs.
Save me from the mouth of the lion;
save me from the horns of the wild oxen.

I will proclaim Your name to my brothers;
I will praise You in the assembly.
You who fear the LORD, praise Him!
All descendants of Jacob, honor Him!
All offspring of Israel, revere Him!
For He has not despised or detested
the torment of the afflicted.
He has not hidden His face from him,
but has attended to his cry for help.

My praise for You resounds in the great assembly;
I will fulfill my vows before those who fear You.
The poor will eat and be satisfied;
those who seek the LORD will praise Him.
May your hearts live forever!

All the ends of the earth
will remember and turn to the LORD.
All the families of the nations
will bow down before Him.
For dominion belongs to the LORD
and He rules over the nations.
All the rich of the earth will feast and worship;
all who go down to the dust will kneel before Him—
even those unable to preserve their lives.
Posterity will serve Him;
they will declare the Lord to a new generation.
They will come and proclaim His righteousness
to a people yet unborn—
all that He has done.

In this Psalm we see that there is an alternation between the experience of the author and his knowledge of God’s character. His faith is expressed in his clinging to his knowledge of God’s character even as the situation he finds himself in seems to completely contradict that character. The Psalm culminates in the confident praise of someone who knows that God has heard him.

Christ quotation from Psalm 22 was no accident. We are meant to understand this Psalm as a depiction of his faith. The first thing we should understand from his quotation of this Psalm is that he suffered mental anguish from what he experienced just as we would suffer mentally from what he suffered. I think there is always the temptation to believe that Jesus Christ really did not suffer in all the ways we would suffer. To be sure, he is portrayed beaten and suffering all over the world. But I think we tend to see this as the suffering of a God who feels nothing and not a man who feels things like us. We know he had the wounds but we doubt that they impacted him in his mind as they would us. Yet his quotation from Psalm 22 should remind us that he suffered even in his mind as we would suffer.

The paradox of all powerful God who can suffer as we can has always struck those outside the faith as one of the most unreasonable things about Christianity. An old riddle that asks if an almighty God could make a stone that too heavy for himself to lift illustrates the natural way the human mind looks at this problem. The riddle is meant to be an unsolvable paradox because of course someone who is almighty can’t make something that he can’t lift and still be almighty. But we who believe the Gospel accounts know that God came in a form that was beaten so badly that he could not carry his own cross and it had to be passed on to another man to carry. And the Gospels make it clear that it was not only the weakness of the body that he shared with us. We read in the gospels that he was surprised. We read in the gospels that he wept. We read in the gospel of Matthew that he asked “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.”

This request is the perfect example of faith. It contains that the pain that makes necessary the trust and it expresses that trust even in the face of the seeming hopelessness of what lies ahead. But this trust is not a wild despairing fatalism that knows that God will do whatever he wants because no one can stop him. Rather it is the faith of one who knows the character of God even though he has taken on the form of a limited man. And as a limited man he trusted himself to God even though he suffered the same pain that led Job to despair.

Christ’s perfect faith was not built on his power because in many ways he gave up his power to become a man. Rather, his faith was founded on his perfect knowledge of God’s character because he could not give up the fact that he and the Father were as one. He could trust his father because he knew his father perfectly. In the same way, it is this contrast between what we know of the character God and what we experience that makes a Christian faith what it is.

If we had no pain and no confusion there would be no need for faith. If we know everything, we have no need for faith. If we are comfortable and happy there is no need for faith. We all know that that as frail humans with limitations we need faith because on our own power we cannot know all things and we suffer in many ways. And we all know this faith should be based on God’s character and his word as much as his power. But how can we come to know the character of a truly unlimited God?

We who are Christian know that Jesus Christ did many things for us. But we often forget that one of the greatest things he did for us is enable us to truly know the character of God through the person of himself and the Spirit that he sent. We might say that we did not need Christ to come to know that. We might say that it would be sufficient to be told the answer. But Job was told that God was good and in the face of suffering he still called out for a mediator. Our inability to understand his power means that we are unable to understand how what we see around us can be reconciled with what we are told about his character.

For us to participate in the faith of Christ, it is not enough to be told the God is good. We must be able to know that God is good the way that Christ knew the Father. And to come to this knowledge we must come to know Jesus as we read in John Chapter 14…

Philip said to Jesus, “Lord, show us the Father. That is all we ask.” Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you all this time and you do not know Me yet? Whoever has seen Me, has seen the Father.

God come down from the heaven bearing the weakness that we suffer from and yet being without sin to create the mediator that Job was looking for. Through faith in him and his character we can dare to approach even an almighty God. This is why the author of Hebrews writes…..

We do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin. Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.

Earlier we compared the grief of Mary with the complaint of Job. But there was one critical difference. Job professed his dread of the power of God and said that dread created a barrier between himself and God. On the other hand, Mary freely came to Jesus with her grief and pain. There was no fear of Jesus in Mary even though she could no more understand the death of her brother then Job could understand what happened to him. Mary’s faith that she could come freely to Jesus was founded on her knowledge of the character of Jesus. And it is this knowledge of the character of God that the Spirit gives to us. As Paul says in the very same chapter of 1 Corinthians that I quoted from earlier…..

The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us.

It is knowing the character of God in an intimate way that makes us his children. All young children fail to understand all that their parents do. But from the time they are born, children learn the character of the parents even before they learn words. Since humans fail in many ways, this knowledge the children gain of their human parents character is not always good. Nonetheless young children will have a good understanding of their parent’s character long before they can understand the reasons behind all the actions that their parents take.

In a similar manner, we who have the faith of Christ have all been given an understanding of the character of God through his Spirit but we are not all the same age as it were. Some of us understand things differently because we are more mature. Others of us suffer from things that others don’t and so we can’t understand the burdens they are bearing. We differ in many ways and many respects and that is why we can become confused on matter of food and other things. But we should all have this in common. We should all have the character of God being revealed to us by God’s own Spirit through the working of his power within us. It is in knowing the character of God through the working of his Spirit within us that enables us to have the faith of Christ even though we don’t understand his actions.

But these are only empty words without experience to give them meaning. I know from firsthand experience how little understanding comes from hearing words like those that I have been saying. I can remember what it is like to try to muster faith because you were told that you needed faith for the right words to be effective. I remember what it is like to say the right words and try to make myself believe them only to be left with nothing. I know how impossible it is generate the needed faith from one’s own resources. So I know that there is no way around the fact that the authority that underlies a Christian faith is something we have to experience for ourselves. And this is what lies behind Paul’s charge in 2 Corinthians Chapter 13 to…

Examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith; test yourselves. Do you not realize that Christ Jesus is in you—unless, of course, you fail the test?

This is a call to test the authority that underlies your faith. If it is not based on power of Christ within you then it is nothing. But this leads me to a somewhat unusual question. If we do realize that we have Christ Jesus within us, how do we express our faith as we actually experience it?

This is a little bit of a trick question. Most Christians hear this question and think the question is about how to convince others to come to the faith. And so the answers you get will vary but they will all be based on that particular Christian’s view of apologetics or evangelism. But I am not asking about how we convince others, I am asking how we express our faith as we experience it with all that it entails. I rarely see people evangelize by honestly expressing what it is like to experience a Christian faith in daily life. Maybe people should do this (I personally think it depends on the situation) but the point is that what we experience and what we share for purpose of convincing others are often very different things.

I know that if I make it clear I am not talking about evangelizing or apologetics then the next natural answer that many Christians would give is that we express our faith in the way in which we live. And there is a sense that this true if you use a loose definition of what express means. Certainly we act out our faith in the way we live our lives but if you stick to a very literal definition of the word “express” then how we live our lives is not how we express our faith.

Maybe I am belaboring this point to much. Maybe this is a problem peculiar to me. But I certainly struggle with how to express my faith and the experience of God’s power that drives my faith in an honest and clear way.

I have done the standard things like give my testimony about how I came to be “saved”. I even took the time to write out an explanation of that experience. It was written badly and in place of great pain in terms of my personal life but it at least had the virtue of being honest. Yet when I look back on it, what strikes me is that though it honestly describes the events surrounding and leading up to the experiencing of God’s power, it fails to come even close to describing in any kind coherent way what that experience is actually like.

Even if we look past the deficiencies in my testimony, it was only one event in my life albeit the start of a new kind of life. But since that time I have been happy and sad, sinned and done good works, and all the rest of things that happens during life. And all of these things have taken place while experience God’s power working within me that has never left me since the first day it came. But how do I express these experiences in a clear and honest way?

Perhaps this is a result of failings on my end. Certainly I put too much emphasis on dignity even at the expense of truth. But I think for the most part it has nothing to do with failings on my end. There are many things that humans experience for which we don’t find prose adequate. That is why we have poetry and songs and other ways of expressing what we experience beyond straight prose. We all have different gifts and I lack the poetry to express things that can’t be handled by prose (even when using lots and lots of prose as is my wont).

It is for this reason that the closest I can come to expressing what it is like to experience power of God that sustains my faith is borrow the words of others. And what I borrow most often is the songs that come out of the Christian community. In this I don’t think I am alone. Even those without a Christian faith acknowledge that there are many things that human’s experience that are better expressed through music and poetry then inadequate prose. How much more is this true about human’s experience of an almighty God?

There is a reason the Bible speaks often of the songs of the redeemed. Moses sang his song with his people after coming through the sea. In Revelations we see the redeemed learning a new song. I think that much of the time that the work of God’s Spirit is beyond the ready expression of prose and those of us who are not gifted in anything other than prose will struggle to express what they experience. But through the gifts of those who are so gifted, all of us can find a voice to express what we collectively experience.

At least that is my experience. I find great joy in those songs in which I see the same Spirit that I experience. Through these songs I can express what is beyond my own abilities to express. And I don’t believe that I am alone in this. It seems that all the Churches that place the most stress on a faith based on a personal experience of God’s power also put the most stress on the singing of songs as part of the worship service. And if anything, the focus on the music in most such churches has only increased over the course of my lifetime with a correlating increase in the production values of that music.

This greater focus on the music has gone hand in hand with other things. It has lead to the growth of what is called the “Christian” music industry. This market segment went from being next to nothing in terms of monetary value to being tracked even in secular publications because of its economic value in less then forty years. Along with the rise of Christian music came the rise of the mega church. Sociologist and Christians have debated why this is true but one undeniable fact is that the mega churches have higher production values in their worship services then the smaller churches. Given the rising importance that seems to be placed on those worship services, it seems likely that advantages in terms of the quality of music are one of the reasons for the rise of the mega church.

Yet along with this rise of “Christian” music came the rise of those who felt that it was all fake and worthless. Of course that was to be expected from those who left the Christian faith with bitterness in their hearts for one reason or another. But there is another group that makes the same complaints about the fakery who would deny that they have left the faith. And that is the growing numbers of former evangelicals (and other Protestants) who joined the Catholic Church. This switch over is small in terms of overall number of nominal Catholics but it is a very large percentage of Catholics who take their church’s doctrine seriously. Odds are good that if you discover someone on-line or in person in North America who religiously adheres to Catholic doctrine you will find that they come from an evangelical background.

I have seen this switch over both in people who I have known and watched it happen to people that I follow online. And what is striking is how large the role aesthetic issues seem to play in the switch over. There are various intellectual issues that they would give as reasons but what often seems to have started their journey was an aesthetic experience. The contrast between a church service with centuries of tradition behind it and a pop concert masquerading as a worship service seems to have convinced some people to start examining what else the Catholic Church got right.

Another source of complaints against the current reality of contemporary Christian music can also be found in people who made a professional living in contemporary praise and worship music. From artists in the business I have heard allegations that an “excessive” focus on the work of Christ on the cross was resisted or forbidden in what was a supposedly Christian industry. From others I have heard claims appearances were valued over substance to the point that female artists were being instructed to change their appearance if they wanted to keep their label. Topics such as depression and struggling with suicidal thoughts were not allowed to be addressed by “Christian” artists. And so on and so forth.

The point is that there is wide variety of people from differing backgrounds dissatisfied with fakery and superficiality in Christian music. And the solutions are as wide and diverse as the critics are. For the unbelievers, the state of Christian music is proof of the fundamental fakery of the Christian faith. For those who value tradition the solution is to go back to the only accompaniment being a badly tuned piano and sing songs written before 1920. For those dissatisfied with their own tradition they turn to a worship service that was an innovation a thousand years after the death of Christ but now is a sacrosanct tradition due to the passage of another thousand years. For those who value doctrine highly, the solution is to get more doctrine into songs. For those who want to be true artists, the solution to broaden the scope of acceptable topics. For those who want to be perfect, they will sing only psalms found in the bible because then anyone who tries to criticize your choice of music is by definition blasphemous.

Naturally I am not being entirely fair with these characterizations. Behind every one of those one liners you can fine people who sincerely believe in them and have put a lot of thought into justifying their position and who might find my characterizations insulting. With many of those people I myself sympathize what they are saying to varying degrees. But I think they all share one similar fundamental flaw. They focus their discussion on the nature of the music and not on what we are trying to express with that music.

Some would undoubtedly dispute that characterization. I think those who want more doctrine in their music would feel particularly aggrieved by the claim that they focus on the music and not what we are trying to express by the music. After all, their whole argument is centered on improving “Christian Music” by adding doctrine to make what it expresses weightier. But I think they have not stopped to think about what they need music to express. Can they not write prose that expresses doctrine? What does putting doctrine in a song accomplish that writing it out does not? Why do we need music and songs at all in our expression of the Christian faith?

If you look at the Bible, doctrine is expressed in the prose whether that be the repetitive tomes of the law or the twists and turns that make up the book of Romans. If you look at the poetry in the Bible it is used by those who are expressing what they experienced whether it is a prophet expressing his vision or David dealing with his struggles. We likewise need music and poetry to express the experience of our faith because prose is never adequate for things we cannot fully understand. And who among us can say that we fully understand what even Paul calls a mystery?

And what is the experience of our faith? It is the contrast between knowing God’s character through the power that is at work within us and being human in this fallen world with all that entails that both enables our faith and makes our faith necessary. If we attempt to express our faith with music, should it not encompass those themes as we experience them?

When faced with a question like that, every Christian is going to say “of course Christian music should encompass those themes.” And I think that is why I don’t see many people critiquing Christian music on those grounds. Nobody is going to argue against it and everyone thinks they are already doing it so it does not get much traction as a critique. But if you compare how David expresses his faith in the Psalms with how contemporary Christian music expresses faith, I think you will see that much of contemporary Christian music is very lacking when it comes to expressing our experience of a Christian faith.

By way of example, let us consider what David deals with in Psalm 51. In Psalm 51 he starts off by saying….

Have mercy on me, O God,
according to your unfailing love;
according to your great compassion
blot out my transgressions.
Wash away all my iniquity
and cleanse me from my sin.

For I know my transgressions,
and my sin is always before me.
Against you, you only, have I sinned
and done what is evil in your sight;
so you are right in your verdict
and justified when you judge.

I think anyone who has a Christian faith can recognize this experience from their own life. Honestly, I think that if they were being honest they could recognize multiple times where they have had an experience like this in their own heart between themselves and God. I would go so far as to say it is a significant part of the Christian experience.

But if it is a significant part of the Christian experience why are there so few “Christian Songs” that touch on the topic? I know Keith Green wrote a song called “Create In Me A Clean Heart” based on this Psalm long ago, but I would be hard pressed to name a song written in the last twenty years that dealt with coming to God with our sin and failings.

And how many of us can identify with Psalm 13? In this Psalm David starts off by saying….

How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I wrestle with my thoughts
and day after day have sorrow in my heart?
How long will my enemy triumph over me?

Look on me and answer, Lord my God.
Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death

Isaac Watts wrote a beautiful hymn called “How Long O Lord?” based off of this Psalm back in the early 1700s. But how many praise and worship songs of today wrestle with this feeling of abandonment in such stark terms? And yet can we really say that this feeling is a rare experience in the Christian faith? These are undoubtedly some of the darker Psalms but they are by no means unique. More to the point, it is dark things that make faith necessary. So how can we truly express our faith without touching on those feelings that we struggle that require us to fall on our faith?

Of course, these dark things by themselves are not sufficient. The world is full of dark music of varying degrees of quality. Expressing our faith is not only about expressing what makes our faith necessary, it is also about expressing what makes our faith possible. When David is wrestling with his issues, he expresses his experience of God’s character right along with his expression of what he is going through. Often, his Psalms (and others that we have recorded for us) deal solely with his experience of God with nary a mention of his own issues.

But even when it comes to expressions of God’s character, I find that contemporary Christian music in general is lacking. I suspect more people would be inclined to dispute this assertion then the claims of about Christian music not dealing with the darker feelings that make our faith necessary. But I can’t help feeling the God expressed in most Christian music is a characterless and featureless thing. I think this comes out more clearly if you compare how contemporary Christian music talks about God with how Psalms talks about God.

For example, at the start of Psalm 139 we read….

You have searched me, Lord,
and you know me.
You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.
You discern my going out and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.
Before a word is on my tongue
you, Lord, know it completely.
You hem me in behind and before,
and you lay your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
too lofty for me to attain.

Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.
If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,”
even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you.

For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place,
when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed body;
all the days ordained for me were written in your book
before one of them came to be.
How precious to me are your thoughts, God!
How vast is the sum of them!
Were I to count them,
they would outnumber the grains of sand—
when I awake, I am still with you.

Compare the richness of David’s understanding and experience of the nature of God with your typical modern praise song. Your modern praise song will tell you that God loves you and that he will win in the end. And that is if you get a song that someone put some work into its lyrics. Others are little better the mindless chanting of some variation of “Praise the Lord.” There is often little or no sense from the songs that God has any kind of character that can be expressed or that the author of those songs has ever experienced God in any kind of meaningful way. And yet our faith is necessarily founded on the character of God as much as his power. How can we truly express our faith without expressing the character of God in whom we have this faith?

I say this knowing full well that Rich Mullins wrote a beautiful interpretation of Psalm 139 in his song “Nothing Is Beyond You.” In fact, the Psalms that I have chosen to illustrate the failures of modern Christian music are all ones that I know Christian song writers have tackled at one point or another. I made these choices to show that I know that even today Christian music can be a wonderful expression of our faith because I still experience this myself. But so often it seems to me to be the fake and empty thing that its critics allege.

Why is this? If we experience a faith that is alive and real why is our music so often dead?

Such questions can only be definitively answered by the Almighty. But for what it is worth I think a large part of the problem stems from the issues with misplace authority that Paul tried to address when he talked about disputes about food. In other words, I think a large part of what shapes Christian music is not our experience but our desire to be an authority. Not an authority in the sense that we are trying to tell them what to do through music but rather in being an authority in the sense that we are trying to give people something to put their faith in with our music. We can’t give them the Holy Spirit. We can’t give them an understanding of a God who is beyond words. But we think perhaps if we manipulate emotions enough we can bring people to the “right place” and they will be led into to doing that right things and then finally God’s Spirit will take over.

These desires turn Christian music into ads with high production values. When you make an ad to sell something you know people don’t really want facts and figures. We associate things with experiences. If we have good experiences with something we like it and if we have bad experiences we don’t like it. Advertisers know that when we are presented with something we have never tried before what we are wondering is what type of experience we are going to have with that product. And so the advertiser tries to evoke an experience that they think people will want to have in order to sell their product. And this is what I think Christian music so often turns into. Instead of Contemporary Christian music trying to express our experience of God, it is trying to sell God to people by creating an experience. But in the process of trying to create an experience instead of expressing one, we lose anything genuine and our music becomes as fake and shallow as a Super Bowl advertisement.

From personal experience, I think this contrast becomes especially stark if you hear a song expressing a Christian faith mixed in with songs trying to create that experience. I think back to one time in my life I went to a church that I had never been to before. I was not expecting much and the worship experience was what I had come to expect from modern churches. Honestly, I think it might have been less bad then I was expecting but that feeling might be shaped by the one memory that has stayed with me out of the that experience. You see in amongst all the other songs in the choreographed service I heard….

Seems I’ve imagined Him all of my life
As the wisest of all of mankind
But if God’s Holy wisdom is foolish to men
He must have seemed out of His mind

For even His family said He was mad
And the priests said a demon’s to blame
But God in the form of this angry young man
Could not have seemed perfectly sane

When we in our foolishness thought we were wise
He played the fool and He opened our eyes
When we in our weakness believed we were strong
He became helpless to show we were wrong
And so we follow God’s own fool

These are the opening lines of Michael Card’s song God’s Own Fool and they had an emotional impact on me far greater then I would have believed even if I had been warned in advance. In amongst all the other songs designed to get your blood pumping and to get you in a “worshipful” state of emotion, someone slipped in a song about God as I knew him and experienced him. I did not realize I was so hungry to be able to express such things with others and I certainly did expect to be moved to tears. This impact was all the more surprising because I knew the song from my own musical collection so it was not the first time I had ever heard it. But in the context of otherwise vapid worship service it was both more moving and made the rest of the songs more painful by comparison.

For those of us in the grips of a faith that drives us to live in ways that seem insane to the world at large, God’s Own Fool has meaning. We recognize what the song is saying as being expressed in our own life by the faith that is making us. But who would expect this song to have any meaning to an unbeliever? If we are trying to convince an unbeliever to give us a hearing, we want a song talking about how God will make everything all right or about how he loves everyone. Moreover, we want a song that will grab hold of them emotionally without them having to understand much of anything. So if we are looking for music that people can build a faith on (or to be more charitable, lead them to faith) we are never going to look at songs that accurately express God’s character like God’s Own Fool. But in creating music that tries to convince people to be interested in God while not actually talking about his character, we create a presentation of God that is flat and featureless. And often, that comes across as being fake and meaningless even if the faith that drives us to create that music is real.

What I am trying to get at is that our understanding of the authority that underlies our faith will directly translate into our music. But I think the people who would most readily agree with my assertion that Christian music should be an expression of how we experience our faith would be the ones who would have the most difficulty understanding this point. To most people, authority in a Christian context conjures up visions of doctrine and creeds. So to start talking about how our music reflects our understanding of authority would seem to backtrack on what I have said earlier about how music should be an expression of our experience and not doctrine. Perhaps it would be easier understand what I am trying to say if we step away from our own time and look back in Christian history.

Long before the founding of the United States, the prolific writer of hymns by the name of Isaac Watts was embroiled in a dispute about music that was totally different from the discussions surrounding contemporary Christian Music of today. In his case, he was a member of churches that inherited their traditions from John Calvin. And since John Calvin does not seem to have been fan of singing anything other than Psalms, many Calvinist then (and some still today) believed that one should not sing anything other than Psalms in a church service. Since Isaac Watts was prolific writer of songs and yet still remained part of this tradition, this put him in center of a controversy about whether it should be permissible to sing “uninspired” songs in a church service.

Now I don’t have time to do this dispute justice. But to put things crudely, Isaac Watts thought it was wrong that the songs being song in Church reflected a purely Old Testament view without any reflection of the revelation of God found in the Gospels. His critics thought he was placing his own creative talents over the inspired word of God and so making the worship services man centered. Looking at it from the outside there was almost no theological disagreement between Isaac Watts and his critics. On all major points of doctrine, Isaac Watts was proper adherent to what his Church taught. For this reason, I don’t see the dispute between Isaac Watts as being a doctrinal one. Rather, at its core I see it as being a dispute about what gives those doctrines meaning.

In the case of Isaac Watts’ critics, it seems to me that they see the words of the bible and their careful crafted doctrines as what gave their faith meaning. It was for this reason that they did not want anything other expressed in their church other then the words of the Bible and their carefully crafted doctrines. On the other hand, Isaac Watts felt that it was Christ and his works that gave his doctrine and words of the Bible meaning. As such, he wanted to be able to express his experience of Christ and his works in the Church.

Obviously, my summary reflects that fact that I am prejudice in favor of Isaac Watts. It seems to me that his critics did not understand what Jesus meant when he said….

You have never heard his voice nor seen his form, nor does his word dwell in you, for you do not believe the one he sent. You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.

But the point of this story is not to argue against a view that few Christians today hold. Rather, I think it is easier as an outsider looking in to see how people can have the same doctrine in almost all respects and yet for their expression of their faith to be so markedly different. Whether you agree with my characterization of the differing views or not, I think it is clear that when it came time to express their faith Isaac Watts and his critics had differing views of what was important even though on paper they shared a common faith. If that was true in his time, could it not be true about our time as well?

In some respects the questions that Isaac Watts and his critics wrestled with are at the opposite end of the spectrum from what Contemporary Christian music and its critics wrestle with. Indeed, throughout Christian history various Christians have argued for everything from an almost Islamic aversion to musical instruments to worship services that were carnival like in their nature. It is human nature to want to say that the truth must be in middle of all of these disputes. But if we understand that our faith must be rooted in Christ and his power to have any meaning, then it follows that our music must be rooted in the same or it will be meaningless. It does not matter if it is plan chant or accompanied by electric guitars and drum rolls, Christian music in the absence of Christ is always going to be meaningless.

How then are we going to ensure that our Christian Music is founded on Christ and his power?

This is not a question we are all going to answer the same way. Even if we have all have the same faith rooted in the same authority, we are not going to come to the same answer to this question for the same reasons that Christian’s in Paul’s day could not agree on the permissibility of certain foods. By the nature of my own argument, it would be wrong to try to fix this problem by some manmade authority. What we are longing for is a congregation yet to come led by a Messiah who prophetically is promised to lead the singing of a new song.

But if that is what we are longing for, we should be rooting our understanding of our worship music in our understanding him who is to come and what Paul in 2 Corinthians 1:22 calls the deposit he has given us to guarantee what is to come. This is why I spent so long on talking about our faith before I got on to talk about our music. There are many aesthetic aspects to music that we can critique in Christian music that apply to music as a whole. But if we are going to talk about the “Christian” aspect of the music then we need start by examining the basics of our faith.

Paul’s challenge “Do you not realize that Christ Jesus is in you—unless, of course, you fail the test?” should not limited to examine the source of our faith. No rules can give life to dead and no rules can impart Christ to our music. The only thing that can give life to our music is that which gives life to our faith. So let us hunger to see Christ and his works as we know them expressed in our music as we hunger to see them expressed in our life. Let us not be satisfied with music shaped only by tradition or a desire to appeal to those who don’t know God just as we would not be satisfied if those were the things shaping our life.